iNaturalist hit 1.5 million observations

[AfriBats]

Congratulations to the entire iNat community!!! Cheers, Jakob

[Scott Loarie]

Yes very cool! 

Looks like its been 220 days since iNat hit 1 million obs

so thats been an average of 1.6 observation a minute since - not bad!

On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 11:34 AM, AfriBats <jakob...@gmail.com> wrote:

Congratulations to the entire iNat community!!! Cheers, Jakob

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--------------------------------------------------
Scott R. Loarie, Ph.D.
Co-director, iNaturalist.org
California Academy of Sciences
55 Music Concourse Dr
San Francisco, CA 94118
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[naturen...@gmail.com]

Are iNat stats visualized in some place on the site?  I could imagine some really neat graphs that would show interrelations between number of users, diversity of taxa, taxa richness related to differentials in user interaction, rate of new species being added to iNat (by locality/user interaction)....so much!

[Scott Loarie]

Not at the moment, but thats something I'd love to make happen

[AfriBats]

Seconded! And a bit along the lines of data visualization: I think illustrating the phenology of species (= their observations over time) would be great to feature more prominently on iNat. There's already something in this direction on the place pages (where, in a certain way, it makes most sense), but I think it would enrich iNat's value for many users if the appearance of a given species over the course of a year would be automatically displayed on the taxon page.

For wide-ranging species, this would be obviously a quite blurred pattern, but many others will show very distinct phenologies.

[Scott Loarie]

I agree that would be great to have moving forward

But for now a little known feature that may work for you is that if you set a 'place' on your account (I've set my account to CA) in addition to seeing common names specific to your place on the taxon names (e.g. California Bay instead of Oregon Myrtle) You also see Place specific establishment means, conservation status, and phenology as in the attached screenshot.

Won't give you a global overview, but might work for you if you're mainly interested in a particular place 

On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 3:49 PM, AfriBats <jakob...@gmail.com> wrote:

Seconded! And a bit along the lines of data visualization: I think illustrating the phenology of species (= their observations over time) would be great to feature more prominently on iNat. There's already something in this direction on the place pages (where, in a certain way, it makes most sense), but I think it would enrich iNat's value for many users if the appearance of a given species over the course of a year would be automatically displayed on the taxon page.

For wide-ranging species, this would be obviously a quite blurred pattern, but many others will show very distinct phenologies.

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[naturen...@gmail.com]

I agree with all that, of course. 

Ecologically, with a database large/robust enough, algorithms could be developed to discover likelihood of host or pollinator associations, particularly for ephemeral species based on timing of photo/data of arthropod and host, especially where there is a range of observability over geographic space.

Abundance, this metric/index would be difficult as the field is not included in the Observation Submission.  However, Ebird uses an interesting measure for frequency for their phenology/bar charts.  I think a  lot of people do not realize this, but their bar charts are based on the percentage of checklists which the said species appears on, regardless of 10 or 10 thousand individuals.  Perhaps a good iNat adaption to this would be percentage of times a said taxon is documented within a participating member's observations during a 24 hour period.

The stat visualization that I was originally talking about was to deal more with determining the effect of user interaction on organized biogeographical information.  Also to measure the effect that iNat is having on its users; which I would assume the site is making many of us better biogeographers.  

[Charlie Hohn]

Interesting... it would be fun to set up some kind of protocol, I guess that might work within the trips functionality that was discussed.  But say, if I spend a day in a large forest dominated by sugar maple with two ash trees, I'd usually only put in one ash and one or two sugar maples, unless I saw one doing something unusual.  Maybe there needs to be a way to indicate that, or maybe I should be putting dominants in more often? That hits on the ntaural community discussion a little bit.  Currently the only thing I put in multiple times in a small area is usually invasives - certain bad ones I mark any time I see them.

============================
Charlie Hohn
Montpelier, Vermont

coyot.es/slowwatermovement

[AfriBats]

But for now a little known feature that may work for you is that if you set a 'place' on your account (I've set my account to CA) in addition to seeing common names specific to your place on the taxon names (e.g. California Bay instead of Oregon Myrtle) You also see Place specific establishment means, conservation status, and phenology as in the attached screenshot.

There's always a new iNat functionality to discover, and this one certainly looks fun. Will check it out!